The Man Who Designed Left 4 Dead and Evolve Just Built a 700-Horsepower 1964 Ford Galaxie From the Ground Up

A former video game designer traded twenty-five years of shipping hit titles for a welding torch and a Ron Sutton race chassis. His shop’s signature build, a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500, now makes 700 horsepower through a six-speed manual and wears battleship-camouflage paint. Here’s how a career spent solving problems on screen turned into one of the wildest restomods on the road.

Chris Ashton spent twenty-five years designing video games most gearheads never connected to his name. He worked on Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 at Westwood Pacific, then spent more than a decade co-owning Turtle Rock Studios, helping ship Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, Evolve, and Back for Blood — games played by millions of people who had no idea the guy behind them would eventually trade a keyboard for a welding torch. When Ashton finally did walk away to build cars full-time, the machine that put his shop on the map wasn’t a Mustang or a Camaro. It was a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500, stripped down to a full-tube race chassis and rebuilt from the ground up with 700 horsepower, a six-speed manual, and a two-tone camouflage paint scheme inspired by World War II battleships. Hagerty host Henry Catchpole called Ashton’s shop, Ruffian Cars, “one of the most inspiring places” he’s ever visited. After watching what came out of that garage, it’s not hard to understand why.

Hagerty’s The Driver’s Seat sent Catchpole to Ruffian’s Southern California shop for an extra-long episode built around one question: what happens when a career problem-solver from the video game industry decides the American muscle car hasn’t been pushed far enough? Catchpole doesn’t just drive the Galaxie — he spends real time with Ashton walking the shop floor, talking through the decisions behind every panel gap and suspension pickup point, and getting a look at the rest of the builds in progress.

What comes through in the video is that this Galaxie isn’t a show car dressed up to look aggressive. Catchpole notes it could easily be mistaken for something built to cruise to a Saturday coffee meet, until it’s underway and the chassis underneath starts talking back — full race-car composure, an engine that pulls hard to redline, and steering feedback Catchpole says he genuinely wasn’t prepared for out of a car this size.

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The 1964 Galaxie 500’s Real Muscle-Car Pedigree

Ashton didn’t pick the Galaxie 500 at random. Ford had only gotten serious about backing organized racing since Henry Ford II pulled the company out of the industry’s 1957 anti-racing pact in June 1962, and by 1964 — the final year of the second-generation Galaxie — the results showed. The factory offered the Galaxie 500 with the legendary 427 “R-code” option: an FE-series big-block rated at 425 horsepower, built around dual Holley four-barrel carburetors on an aluminum intake, an open-element air cleaner, solid lifters, and a “top-oiler” lubrication system engineered to feed the crank and main bearings first so the engine could survive sustained 7,000-rpm abuse. Ford built roughly 208 R-code convertibles that year, plus around 50 ultra-rare lightweight two-door hardtops purpose-built for NHRA competition. On the NASCAR side, the investment paid off: Ford took the checkered flag in 30 of the season’s 62 races.

That racing pedigree is exactly why the Galaxie 500 is such a fitting canvas for what Ruffian Cars does. The nameplate was never just a family sedan trim — it was Ford’s answer to a very real question about how much big-block muscle a full-size car could handle on track. Sixty years later, Ashton is asking the same question with modern tools and a much bigger budget.

700 Horsepower on a Full Race Chassis

The numbers on Ashton’s Galaxie make the original R-code look almost tame. The build starts with a 526-cubic-inch aluminum-block Ford FE V8 producing 700 horsepower, backed by a GForce-built T56 six-speed manual with dog-ring engagement on first through fourth gear for quicker, more positive shifts under hard use. None of it sits in a stock frame — the entire car rides on a full-tube race chassis designed by Ron Sutton, complete with a flat belly pan and a full-width rear diffuser, air jacks for pit-style lifts, and Penske dampers doing the damping work usually reserved for actual race cars. The stock sheet metal was stretched to swallow 325mm-wide tires wrapped around 20-inch multi-piece wheels, with an aggressive front splitter matching the diffuser out back. The camouflage paint, laid out entirely by hand, draws its pattern from World War II battleship dazzle schemes — a detail that fits a car built less to imitate a period muscle car and more to look like it was engineered for a mission.

Ashton has said this Galaxie represents the closest thing to a full race car his shop is willing to put on the street, and after watching Catchpole wring it out on camera, that reads less like marketing copy and more like a simple description of what the chassis underneath is actually capable of.

From Zombie Shooters to Battleship Camouflage

The Galaxie is far from the only thing rolling out of Ruffian’s doors. Ashton and his team are also known for wild Mustang builds, a Ford GT40 project, and a Plymouth carrying a Viper V10 — plus a replica of the armored personnel carrier from the movie Aliens, which tells you everything you need to know about how Ashton approaches a build brief. It’s the same instinct that drove two decades of game design: start from “what if,” then figure out how to make it real, even if that means learning an entirely new set of skills from scratch. More than one commenter on the Hagerty video made the same connection — that spending a career comfortable with ambiguity, chasing systems nobody has built before, translates directly into a fabrication shop willing to build a race-spec chassis under a 60-year-old body style nobody else is touching.

That crossover is exactly why this story holds up as more than a one-off build video. The Galaxie 500 already earned its muscle-car credentials the hard way, on NASCAR ovals and NHRA strips in the 1960s. Ruffian Cars just proved the nameplate still has room to get faster, six decades later, in the hands of someone who spent his first career building entirely different kinds of machines.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.